The Social Platform Every Crypto Investor Should Be On!

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We have what we call our giga gas roadmap, which
is scaling up to one hundred thousand transactions per second
and have no reorgs, almost instant finality. I don't know
what the price will be tomorrow, but I feel like
I know where we're headed in the next thirty to
fifty years. I feel like I'm a permeable with like

(00:20):
how we're going, and like your rationally optimistic.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
I feel like once that interoperability and those bridges are built,
more consumers are educated, maybe ready, we'll you know, bring
it back, and even more platforms will have NFTs.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
Yeah, I think about it too.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
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to many exchanges, and all the links will be in
a description. Check it out. Hey, folks, welcome into the
Thinking Crypto podcast. I'm your host Tony Edward and joining
me today's two cent Timmy, who's one of the moderators
on the cryptocurrency subreddit on Reddit and he's part of
the Polygon marketing team as well. Timmy, great to have you.
I'm super excited to be here. I'm like, very excited.

(02:50):
I've watched your podcast before.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
I think it's great, So it's yeah, it's fun to
finally be talking to you. I mean we've met in person,
but not on a podcast.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
A yeah for sure. And we met at the Treasure
event in Prague just a few weeks back, and that
was a great event. It was great meeting you, and
you know, we had a conversation about Reddit and the
big part is playing at crypto in addition to the
markets overall. So I'm excited to dive into that conversation
and as well as get some updates around Polygon. But

(03:20):
you know, tell us a bit about yourself. Where are
you from and how'd you get into crypto.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
So I currently lived just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, originally
from Boston, Massachusetts area. And I guess I have like
two intros to crypto and it's kind of funny. So
the first one when I started college. I went to
school starting twenty ten and I was a computer science major,

(03:45):
and early on someone basically asks if we he wanted
to mine bitcoin with him, like using the computer lab.
That's just stupid, like why would anyone do listen, that's
twenty eleven. I'm like, no, I don't want to do this.
I don't want to like whatever. Like and I would say,
you know, like the cliche of like everyone's like, no,

(04:07):
I don't understand this, it's magic Internet money whatever. I'll
move on, uh. And then that person deleted off social
media after her bitcoin over the year when it ran up.
But my second intro to crypto was probably the bigger
one that I actually started using. I would say, I'm
a clash of twenty twenty one cliche. So I my

(04:32):
first crypto purchase ever was doge coin on Robinhood and
it was just trading meme coins having a laugh. And
it's funny because like I feel like Reddit and GameStop
is what brought me to the doge coin like in
Robinhood trading world. But then once I got into crypto,

(04:55):
I was basically hooked and like I really fell in
love with the technology, trying to learn everything I could,
and I think realizing that it was more than just
a meme coin, and like I would say, fell in
love with the It's funny because I never really spent
time studying bitcoin, but all a lot of the ethos

(05:20):
in bitcoin are my personal ethos. I'm like, if I
just spent time way soon I'm learning about it, I
could have like I would have been all in at
that point. Like so it's a but yeah, it's so
basically a little over four years now and I've enjoyed
every minute of it.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
Mostly How did you end up at Polygon?

Speaker 1 (05:42):
It's funny through Reddit? I guess it's a so in
twenty twenty two, Reddit came out with avatars that were
NFT collections and they minted on the Polygon blockchain, and
that was my first intro to Polygon. If I don't know,

(06:02):
was I how do I want to say this? I
am very serious and like care about the technology and
try to take it seriously and with the respect it deserves.
But I also like to have fun, so these avatars
were just like a fun little collectible. Hey, let's have fun.

(06:22):
And I really liked the Polygon ecosystem kind of what
Polygon stood for, where it was like giving sovereignty to
the world, and that includes financial sovereignty, but just our
founder Sandy've talked about like his mission is to give
everyone sovereignty, so whether it's sending payments or having identity

(06:44):
or all of these big things of Okay, I bought
into that the Polygon subreddit was unmoderated that had very
little content on it, and I literally sent out a
tweet saying that the subreddit needs motoration and I'd be
happy to do it. And then I ended up basically
was contacted by a couple of people on their team

(07:06):
and community team, and they said, hey, do you want
a contract? Like, we love what you do and have
been contributing, so we think there's something here. And then
I started working for Polygon. It's a I don't know's
it's the beauty of web three where we say it
all the time, you can just do things, you say things,
and then you make it happen. And that's really how

(07:26):
it worked out for me.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
That's awesome. Yeah, I mean from just like you said,
having fun and then it became sort of your career,
your job right of working web three both on Reddit
but also supporting Polygon. I'm curious, you know, for those
who may not be very familiar with Reddit, right I am.
I know a lot of the different subreddits on Reddit

(07:48):
with crypto, bitcoin and so forth. Give us an overview
of the cryptocurrency subreddit, and I want to make sure
folks know it's slash crypto currency, right, yep, our slash
cryptocurrent and see it's it's right. It's funny because some
people say just cryptocurrency subrought it. Some people say are
cryptocurrency because our precedes every subreddit's so, but yeah, it's

(08:11):
it's the largest cryptocurrency subrodit out there.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
There's over ten million members right now. I was looking.
We had in the last thirty days like fifteen million
page views over that. So it's very very popular, massive,
and it's I would say, it's very different than a
crypto Twitter. The type of user is you get really

(08:43):
really novice users who I would say, I don't know,
they don't know anything about crypto right, they're they're coming
to learn, and if you're on Twitter, it's really hard
to know who to trust in what the good content
is because scams they're popping up all the time. New
blockchains are coming out and some are legitimate and some aren't.

(09:06):
And when you're in the industry, it's you develop tools
to spot them, but if you're brand new, it's really hard.
So our suburb it is more heavily moderated than so
on on Twitter would be used to. But it's intentional
because what we want is there's really not a good

(09:27):
place for someone who knows very little about crypto to
start learning about it in a kind of like safe
we I like to think of it almost like a
walled garden where like we will give you advice, like
here's general practices. It's really interesting because there's a lot
of like I don't know, I would say it's more

(09:51):
negative and more skeptical of everything than even I personally am.
As a community, like I like to take risks, or
like I think the frontier of technology is really interesting,
and I think it's really good for new people to
have this like a massive community of like wait, be
skeptical and it comes out to like the don't trust

(10:12):
verify sort of opportunity, and it might go too far,
and maybe at one point it was too band heavy.
And I know people have talked about like they share
something and then they get banned. But it's like, well,
you're sharing this new project that no one ever heard of.
And if you can imagine a subword with ten million
people who are predominantly novices, bad actors love using the

(10:35):
subword to take advantage of people, like it's sure, it
becomes the targets out like it's a it's interesting. It's
a hard and delicate balance to find between letting new
content and stuff, but I would say that's part of it.
I think a lot of people who are genuine, like
when they reach out, it's nice to have. Like you

(10:57):
and I met and we were talking like, Okay, this
person's going to be genuine. If you start posting content,
we can approve it. But a lot of people just
go and it's like I don't know you from a
hole in the wall, so like I'm not trusting that
you're a good person, which is but yeah, it's there's
content there, there's news articles get posted. One thing that

(11:18):
I think is really cool about the subreddit. And this
is kind of a history story going back, but one
thing I like about Reddit is they've tried a lot
in crypto and web three. So I mentioned the avatars,
but they also had something that they called the Reddit
Community Points Program. So the way Reddit works in general

(11:39):
is there's an upvote button and a downvote button, and
you get karma if you're upvoted, and if you're downvoted,
you lose karma. It's kind of what their point system
is called. And Reddit came out with this feature and
they were piloting it in the cryptocurrency subreddit and then

(12:00):
in a Fortnite subrunnit. It didn't do so well in
the Fortnite subred up, and in the cryptocurrency subredit everyone
loved it where each month, technically every twenty eight days,
they would calculate the karma users earned and then pay
out a ERC twenty token as a governance token to

(12:21):
users proportional to the karma that they earned. So if
the total subredit generated one hundred thousand karma, you got
a thousand, you'll get one percent of the distribution for
that loud And what was really cool about it is
it then acted as a governance token for the subreddit
where each week the community would put up proposals about

(12:44):
ruled on how to govern the subrudit, and then your
weight vote weight was proportional to what you earned. So
it was a cool way of like, hey, the people
who are participating in the most putting out the best
content are the people who have the biggest say in
the community. Reddit eventually sun set that program, but the
moderators in the community are like, well, this was amazing,

(13:05):
we loved it. So now we're all we basically did
a community takeover and there's this token that we use
as a government stoken, which is I think it's fun
and like this really like I said earlier and crypto like,
we're like, this was fun. A centralized entity shut it down.
Let's just take you over it as a community and
make it a decentralized token and project. Well what's that token,

(13:28):
by the way, and is it erc twenty base as well? Yep,
so it's called our cryptocurrency moons. When Reddit introduced it,
they introduced it on arbitram Nova because at the time
that was a super cheap blockchain and super fast. It

(13:48):
then branche to Arbitram one so now it's basically on
nova in one and there's a very small amount on
a theoryum mainenet. But it's yeah, it's just an any
token that people have fun with. And this is not
financial advice. You should not, but like if you don't
know anything about it, like do your research on it.
But it's because I participate in it, I'm like, it's

(14:12):
it's something that I haven't seen anywhere else, and it's
such a unique use case where it's like this is
a community token for the largest subredit and then we
try to give it more use cases too. And I
didn't get to this, but we let projects advertise on
the subreddit whether they're doing amas or we have a

(14:32):
spotlight where we kind of feature them, and they need
to essentially buy the token, burn part of the token,
and then we distribute it back to our community as well.
So it's like this is actually a very circular economy
token where if you're a project that want to get involved,
like you actually have to give something back to our

(14:53):
users in a very like real way. So it's a
it's different and it's fun and basically when we aren't
when projects pay for their ames and moons, we put
it back, give it back to users, whether it's distribution
or we burn it to reduce the supply and things
like that. So that's great. I mean, I in my hat,

(15:16):
I'm like I can imagine like Bitcoin Maximal's hearing this
and like it's a scamble, like all this stuff. It's
a gimmick and it's not that, but like it's not
for everyone. But I'm just like it's a fun, fun
way to power community where the idea is to benefit everyone,
like participating in the ecosystem.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, and I think that makes sense. Right, there's some gamification.
You allow people to have skin in the game, so
to speak. They get rewarded, and it's a token that
actually has value that can trade in the market.

Speaker 1 (15:47):
Right, Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's on I think
it's on Crack. I know it's on Crack and it's
on unit Swamp and camel Lot, and like you can
buy it and sell it and speculate on it if
that's what your heart want to say.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
Do tell us about you know, you mentioned that there's
like ten million users, and you mentioned there's a lot
of crypto newbies and so forth. Why do you think
this subreddit has the appeal versus let's say X or
other social platforms. And I remember, just to add some context,
in my early days, I spent a lot of time

(16:20):
on Reddit because it was much cleaner and it was
easier to read through and pick up things because there
was a lot of noise on X and there still is.
But I feel like, you know, the subredits are cleaner. Yeah, no,
that's a good point, I think. So you have if
I went to my ex right now, what I would
see if I had to guess, is today's November tenth.

(16:43):
So Monad announced the presale. That's going to be flooding
the timeline. There's some drama, there's going to be talk
about we pumped a little bit earlier today, so I'm
just going to like see price chart after price chart,
probably a little bit on the government shutdown. It's like
it's this wave of information that it's really really hard

(17:04):
to find solid footing on Reddit. You can get It's
like I want to go to our cryptocurrency because I
want to see general crypto news, and then you go,
I want to know what's going on with bitcoin. You
go to the bitcoin subred and I want to know
what's going on with Etheroreum. You go to the Ethereum
suburd it. I want to know what's going on with Solana,
I go to the Salona subreddit. I want to know

(17:25):
what's going on with Polygond, I go to the Polygone
sub reddit.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
And then you just start. You can curate it. And
then another benefit to Reddit too is they have flares
for posts on the topic. So like on the cryptocurrency
subred it sometimes is general discussion, sometimes it's news, sometimes
it's advice, sometimes it's a perspective, and you can sort
by that going to find what you want to find.

(17:49):
And I think the last part that makes reddit really
powerful is upvote and down vote. So what ends up
happening is the best content goes to the top, and
that happens on XSU with the algorithm, but the most
uploaded post of caralments you see the most. But you
also get real feedback on what isn't good content. So

(18:12):
when I first got into Reddit and was a novice
to crypto, I said things on the cryptocurrency subreddit and
got downvoted to oblivion, and I'm like that was probably
a stupid thing to say, or a lot of times
see you almost get let's say something slips through the

(18:32):
automoderator feature, then it's a scam and moderators don't see
it and they can't remove it. If that happens on X,
it's just out there forever and doesn't get removed. On Reddit,
you can have users downvote in comment and say this
is a scam, and like, actually, Reddit collapses and hides

(18:53):
heavily downvoted content so it doesn't even get views or seen.
So if you're a beginner, it's like, okay, you have this.
It's way more curated, it's way more refined, and it's
farder to manipulate. Like Reddit. One of the things Reddit
is really good at is anti bought and anti spam features.
And I don't think it gets soken off about it

(19:15):
as a company, but in the r cryptocurrency subword it
you see spam and then it gets removed instantly by Reddit.
And I think that that's really really good for novices
to figure out. And then I think having the silos
of this project, this project, like you can basically go

(19:35):
to where you want and get the information you want
and it doesn't get flooded. And I mean, I have
my own subredits and I have my routine of like,
I'll go to this sub and that's up and that sub,
but it doesn't. My brain is prepared for the content.
So like, I'm also an NBA fan, My Twitter is
filled with NBA content. When I may want to be

(19:55):
a research project and on Reddit, I can go. Now,
I'm going to look at the NBA sub run it
at eight o'clock at night after my work died.

Speaker 2 (20:04):
Right, Yeah, I love it.

Speaker 1 (20:06):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
I'm a big NBA fan as well, So I have
to ask, what's your favorite NBA team?

Speaker 1 (20:11):
The Celtics. It's a rough year. I grew up in Boston.
I can't not be a Celtics fan, and I had
it so good the last two years and this year
it's painful.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
Well, I'm in New York or near New York, so
I'm a Knicks fan. Grew up a Knicks fan, so yeah,
we hate each other.

Speaker 1 (20:29):
So you were very happy, Yeah, last playoffs, but I
won't talk about that much more.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
Yeah. You know, I'm curious with regards to Reddit's integration
of like crypto and blockchain. You know, you mentioned the tokens,
A sunseted that, but you guys kept it going, you know,
specifically for the r cryptocurrency subreddit. But what about the
NFT avatars that you mentioned that was on Polygon. Is

(20:55):
that still enabled on a Reddit?

Speaker 1 (20:58):
Yes, for the time being. It's funny, I said, Reddit
like Satri thinks, so this it was when it started
a wildly successful program. There's something like Reddit. When you
bought an NFT avatar, they created a wallet for the users,
and users didn't even know that they were minting n FT,

(21:19):
so it was created and it was really this nice
combination kind of what the dream of web three people
saying like, oh, we just need to let people use
crypto without knowing that they're using it. Reddit did that
really well. Created the wallet over thirty six million wallets
held avatars, which is insane to me because these were

(21:42):
all Reddit users. And then I don't know if you
paid attention to the NFT market over the last three years,
but it hasn't hasn't been going well. The hype kind
of died down and Reddit announced that they would sunset
the program in January. So it's interesting they won't be
minting any new avatars the ones that you bought and traded.

(22:04):
You can certainly they said, you'll still be able to
use on Reddit. It can still be used as your
little identity and play with it and then it's read.
It announced that about a month ago, and it was
really cool to see the community come out. In the
avatar community just have started building new platforms to still

(22:30):
participate in it. A couple of those are building on Polygon,
where it's not going to be integrated to Reddit. But
if you can imagine, there were a whole bunch of
artists and really strong communities, you just like these characters
that were created. They basically said, like, we're going to
take that technology. We're going to put it in our

(22:50):
own smart contract where you can just mint like artists
can go on and say here's what I want and
then you can mint it for I don't know. I
think they set the price in to be wrong, but
I think less I saw it of like between ten
pole and fifty pole. You could meant your own like
designed similarly to a Reddit avatar by these artists, and
you can play around with it. So I think that's like,

(23:13):
I don't know, Reddit, it has a special place in
my heart where people are negative and they say Reddit
ruins everything, and I don't I'm not going to make
a judgment on that. But what's really cool is when
people say that there's enough people out there that go
out and say like, well, then we'll just do it ourselves.
I think of like the Futurama vendor me and like, well,

(23:35):
I'll make my own like I'll make my own moons,
I'll make my own Reddit avatars. And it's like that's
just embodies Reddit because they're just like, well, we like
this and work community, so that's what we're doing in
this community. So I thought it was really cool to see.
Some people may have different takes, but I loved it.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
It feels yeah, I love it too, And I feel
like it's maybe we're still so early that because the
masses are not fully educated about these things. Where there's
also interoperability with these nft NFTs where you can take
them off of Reddit in a different whatever it is right,
where I can do cool things in other parts of
society or other industries. It's not there yet. But once

(24:20):
that interoperability and those bridges are built and more consumers
are educated, you know as to why this is so
important as technology and how the benefits it can have,
then maybe maybe ready it will you know, bring it back,
and even more platforms will have NFTs.

Speaker 1 (24:36):
Yeah. I think about it too, where I think digital
identity is something that a lot of people actually really
really like, but they don't know enough about digital ID
to like fully use. And I'm like, no, Like you can, yeah,
you can have a picture of yourself, but if you're
you don't want to expose yourself to the world, like

(24:58):
you can have this avatar or MFT and that can
kind of be who you are and kind of how
you present yourself on platforms. And I think it's I
don't know, I want. Some of my favorite things are
if I play a game and then I go on
Twitter and I see the same person as a game,
It's like, wait, you're here too. Like I've actually had

(25:19):
people in crypto who I knew from a previous life.
They're like wait a second, Like that's the same user name,
and it's like, I guess we're interested on the same thing.
But that discoverability is I think really important and really fun,
and I think there's a pathway to that with Reddit avatars.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
Also, Oh for sure. You know, Reddit has an amazing history.
I've used it in many different ways, but you know,
when it comes to markets we saw what happened with
GameStop and AMC, and there's just a huge community there,
especially around crypto as well, and I think it's so

(25:55):
important to have it as a resource and you know,
very different from X and and where a lot of
crypto people hang out as well, but very good for beginners.
And I don't know, yeah, I wonder if we will
see a type of gm E AMC type of rise
for certain crypto tokens.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
It's one thing that I actually love that Polygon was
so open to working for them, like coming from REDIT
and just telling them like so the r cryptocuarancy sub
red it has like community supporters and Polygon has sponsored it.
So this was something I thought was really cool where
I told you about moons and it gets distributed every
month and Polygon to like, well, we believe in creators.

(26:37):
I've read it. And then Polygon's actually putting a whole
for words too to kind of go like, hey, this
is a community we want to tap into. I think
in the age of AI am I how that's used
for research. Reddit something like basically half of AI data,

(26:58):
like half of AI prompt respond with like subreddit pages
and Reddit post which is insane, and I think that
we're seeing if you see trading or speculation or literally
just research. If someone to like I want to send
a stable coin to a friend, what's the best blockchain
to use? And they ask that in AI, it's going

(27:20):
to pull from Reddit to get some information, and I
think we will see that where it's like uh, and
it takes time because AI is slow to update and
models aren't like super responsive in faults, But that's just
a part of the growing technology. I do think I'm
hoping Polygon does this, but like projects that and we've

(27:40):
seen other projects spend time and invest in Reddit. If
your goal is to be like GMME, you're probably going
to fall short. But like you like no, there's a
huge retail community of people who really want to learn
and grow in this space, and we're going to take
time and invest in those people as well, because I think,

(28:02):
I mean, I don't know, you joined something early, you
discovered early, and it leaves an impression on you, and
I think that's like super important. And I think a
lot of people, like I said, because it over moderates
and people get banned and it's hard to introduce projects.
People turn off Reddit right away. And I think that's
entirely the wrong idea. I think it's just like working

(28:24):
within the system and figuring out how to leverage it
to like maximize what you want to accomplish in the world.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yeah, I think you definitely have to have a ready
strategy if you're a crypto project or what it may be,
and have a presence and have that you know, back
and forth conversation because sometimes people have questions or they
have issues, and it's good to be able to have
the transparency and answered the questions and address them and
you know, if you make a mistake, own up to
it right, And I think people appreciate that. But huge

(28:54):
community on Reddit, and I think more people need to
pay attention. And I guess I'm a user, so the
I use x more because of I have to. I
tried to get like different news and interact with certain people,
but I also have read a bookmarks, I go to
Reddit and like, hey, what's trending right now in bitcoin?
What's trending right now cryptocurrency and much more.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
What I was going to say too is I think
you're someone and I'm like this as well, where it's
like I want the news when it breaks because it's
a major part of what we do and how we
are in a living, Like we just have to be
kind of on that cutting edge. But for a novice,
you can find out a day or two later. So

(29:36):
I guess, like, so you can find it, you can currate.
It's funny. I saw I have a friend who uniswap
uh is starting to bull out their runnit strategy, and
he reached out to me and all this stuff, and
un swap somewhere it posted a question where it or
something like where do you get your crypto news from?

(29:58):
And I'm like, well, when I started, it was on Reddit.
And now after a few years, I got my news
for Rex and I share it to Reddit. You're paying
it codes for that next generation of users. Got like, so,
like it is a I don't know. Yeah, I do
think Reddit is important and a Reddit strategy is very
important for companies to have because, like I said, it's

(30:22):
just your true retail user.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
Oh absolutely, yeah yeah, And I, like I said, I
think back to years man when I got into this
market twenty sixteen, and along the way got a lot
of information from Reddit, whether it would be for bitcoin
or different all coins, and joined certain conversations got banned
from some but you know, it's all part of the process.
But yeah, it's a great, great resource. I'm curious what

(30:49):
you can share as far as Polygon, what's new there,
what you guys are working on and so forth.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yeah, I'm so excited for probably Gone's future. And it's
like I said, what drew me to it was this
like core ethos of like what drew me to what
drew me to crypto call it dogecoint was just having
fun and then once I started taking it seriously, I
was like Bitcoin, I'm a huge like personal sovereignty and

(31:17):
freedom is so important to me that like that just
connected me with bitcoin very much. Like you know what,
it's actually really cool to have a censorship resistant, like
decentralized currency that you can use for payment. And I
think one thing that bitcoiners are I would say upset

(31:38):
about or like still up for debate, let's say, is
bitcoin as an actual currency and like means of transact
it certainly hasn't reached the level of adoption that the
most bullish people thought for everyday payment. But Polygon is
really focus on the payment sector and becoming the lead there.

(32:01):
So we spent a lot of time working with different
stable coins. Predominantly it's USD because that's typically what's used
for payments, but we are doing a lot with other
types of stable coins as well, which is so exciting
that people will actually be able to turnsact in their
native currency. For a long time, Polygon was what we

(32:26):
call a general purpose chain where it was built to
scale ethereum and be good at everything, so you could
send payments on Polygon, you could do NFTs, you could
do game, and you could do defy. All of these
send on Polygon. And the as this industry was growing

(32:46):
and maturing, you started seeing chains get more and more
specialized and the like focus because they're like, we are
going to be the best gaming chain, we are going
to be the best DeFi chain, and I'm kind of
tailoring their text sack to that. So Polygons have like
payments are really the number one use case for crypto

(33:07):
is sending money in a cryptograph fleet cryptographically secure way.
So we've been we have what we call our giga
Gas roadmap, which is scaling up to one hundred thousand
transactions per second and having no reorgs, almost instant finality.

(33:29):
We actually just had a hard fork called the Rio
hard fork, where we have five thousand tps and no reorgs,
basically finality within five seconds, which is what you need
for payments, right, like you don't want to be a merchant,
And I don't know, I make the joke about bitcoin
all the time, like I feel like every time that

(33:50):
I try to transform my bitcoin to a central exchange, like, oh,
of course, this is the block that takes thirty five
minutes to mine, Like I feel like I'm with that.
So that's one thing that Polygon'm working on is like
absolutely owning the payments. But then crypto is bigger than that.

(34:10):
So we have another product or initiative called ag layer,
which is the interoperability solution. So we believe that chains
will be specialized in the future and you're just going
to have like app chains and hundreds of thousands of
chains probably who knows how long. But like the way

(34:34):
that we're seeing blockchains kind of get spun up, now
there's going to be a ton of blockchains we saw,
I mean Stripe and PayPal are doing their own blockchain.
So ag layer is this unified liquidity and information layer
where the way I would describe it if you're playing
a game on polaystation and you have a friend playing

(34:57):
a game on Xbox right now, you can't really play
with each other, and ag layer allows you to talk.
So if you go, hey, this is a really cool game.
I'm a gamer. I like this game on Polygon, in
this game on Immutable, like and there are two separate games.
And I have an asset in this game that I
sold for ETH, and then I want to use it

(35:17):
to buy an asset in the other game. Like that's
a painful process for a lot of people, Like you
got a bridge and then you got to wait, like
and it's not good. With ag layer, the idea of like, okay,
then you just take to eth that you just sold
it for and buy the asset on the other chain
and all the hard work takes voice in the background.
But then another really cool thing with ag layer is

(35:39):
we also just announced what we call CDK Enterprise, which
is bringing institutions on chain. So one of the problems
that prevented major companies from going on chain and anti
money wandering and not wanting to commingle fund with pink

(36:00):
did tainted money or like it's it's something I never
thought about, but like, oh, actually, if there's a DeFi
pool and whatever blacklisted funds are in this DeFi pool,
you can't actually trade out of it. So we said, like,
institutions want to come on chain, and we want to

(36:23):
help them do that in a way that supports their initiative.
So I think in crypto, I think people in general
are tribal, and it's like it's us verst them. And
one thing that I really like about Polygon, I'm like,
we're not actually trying to destroy tradifi. We're trying to
make trad fi better through blockchain power. So like we

(36:47):
want to work together and we want to help you.
And then like, by doing this, we can help give
people greater sovereignty, Like you're not going to it's almost
working within the system that currently is, And like, how
can we build a solution for traditional finance to come
on chain and once they do that, things will get better.

(37:08):
It's not Yeah, I would say, it's basically just an upgrade.
Like we're going to just constantly work to make things
better and improve.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
That's great. Yeah, I love that. And you know, interoperabilities
such a key thing. You know, we were just talking
about the NFT avatars and if the technology was there
for interoperability to move these avatars so to speak, or
NFTs to different platforms and have utility around it much more,
that would boost adoption. So but you know we're in

(37:38):
the building phase right the infrastructure being set up or
for all these things. That's really great and great to
hear the progress of polygons making. I'd love to get
your thoughts on what's happening in the crypto market. You know,
we got lots going on with tradfi adopting at a
rapid pace, a lot of folks tokenizing on stable coins,
the banks launching custody, they want to want stable coins.

(37:59):
What are you thought and how the adoption has searched
for crypto.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
I think we are in the regulatory clarity phase of crypto.
Like that's what if you subscribe to the four year cycle,
and like this is what this cycle is. In this cycle,
I think right now a lot of people thought this
was going to be the mass adoption cycle, and I
actually think this is the clarity cycle where we're going to.

(38:28):
This is going to be the foundation for the future.
And like once we set up the systems in place,
the legislation for these traditional finance. That's when mass adoption
will really take off. I mean it's I love seeing
I feel like every other day there's a like this

(38:50):
bank is offering bitcoin assets to its customers, and we
just work with an institutional bankup gone that's allowing hole
staking for their customers, and like seeing this come out
over and over, I'm like, this is really really fun.
I don't it's funny. I'm with the markets. I'm like,

(39:12):
I don't know what the price will be tomorrow, but
I feel like I know where we're headed in the
next thirty to fifty years, like that sort of thing,
and there's always ups and down. So but no, I
think it's super exciting, and I don't. I mean it's
I feel like I'm a permeable with like how we're
going and like irrationally optimistic. But I think, yeah, I

(39:38):
love seeing where the markets are at right now. In general,
I think the cycle kind of got slowed down a
little bit, but we're going to see call it all
season or more assets. So, like, I know bitcoin, I
don't think it's done with its moment, but it had
its run up and we saw it was basically bitcoin

(40:00):
and then I don't know, I throw a dart on
a chart, and like you got these random ones that
did their run. But we haven't really seen the asset
class in crypto have its moment, and I think we
are going to see that very soon. Just I think
it's I think part of it was it was so
much easier everyone knew bitcoin, Like I feel like everyone

(40:23):
knew bitcoin in twenty thirteen or twenty seventeen, Like doesn't
mean they used it or could tell you exactly what
it was, but they heard the word. And so when
you're talking about ETFs and all of these things, like okay,
bitcoin will have this traditional finance I don't know, boomer cycle.

(40:43):
Like all of my friend's parents, like mostly dads asked
me what I think about bitcoin, like and buying it
in their IRA retirement account. It's like, okay, that is
that's progress, and I'm not going to say, like think
negatively of that. But I think eventually, when you get
millennials and gen Z getting older and I would say

(41:05):
have more wealth and equity, then we can really see
a lot of these other sort of I don't know
all points really that provide a different value proposition than
bitcoin does. They will also see really huge girl I
also think the market's really inefficient and doesn't really know

(41:27):
how to price things right now, because that's also new.

Speaker 2 (41:30):
Yeah, I mean, and hopefully we can get the Clarity
Act pass, because I mean that will help boost adoption
once it's illegal, clarity what you can and can't do,
which regulators in charge of what, And it will allow
more folks and more companies in the tech world and
different parts of business to be able to integrate blockchain
and crypto.

Speaker 1 (41:51):
No, yeah, I'm moving forward to.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
That, Yeah for sure. All right, Timmy, I got some
wrap up questions here for you. First, if you could
create your own metaverse, will the theme be.

Speaker 1 (42:00):
Lord of the Rings? I can't tell if she can
tell behind me, but I am a huge Lord of
the Rings.

Speaker 2 (42:05):
Yeah. I love Middle Earth like for sure, rapid fire questions.

Speaker 1 (42:11):
Favorite food probably ice cream? Look forward to eating most?

Speaker 2 (42:17):
Oh? Sure, favorite musician or band.

Speaker 1 (42:20):
I'll be surprised if very many of your listeners have
heard of this band. But they're called Libio, Like they're
kind of an alternative rock band, but I would say
they're they're my favorite one. I feel like also everyone,
it's funny. I know we a one time and I'm
like I feel like music everyone of like your favorite

(42:40):
music was when you were fifteen to twenty two, and
like that's that for everyone? Like what you listen dude
at that age?

Speaker 2 (42:46):
Oh yeah, you get the nostalgic sentimental connection to it. Right.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
Favorite movie I'm going to just say V for Vendetta
was like a very impactful movie for me.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
Yeah, that's one of my favorite movies.

Speaker 1 (43:02):
Favorite book Catch twenty two by Joseph Heller.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
And when you're not working, what are you doing for fun?

Speaker 1 (43:07):
Watching basketball? Playing basketball? Honestly, I feel like I also
am living the dream where I'm like trying to figure
out where the next Like crypto play is like it's
it's my job and it's a very big time hobby.

Speaker 2 (43:22):
So nice. You should check out what Tristan Thompson and
some of these guys have been doing. They've been working
on some crypto projects.

Speaker 1 (43:30):
That's then charged.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
Yeah, yeah, so we'll see you. I know there's been
NBA top Shot and some of it was like NFT
based and so forth.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
Yeah, I think top Shots was an amazing getting people
on chain. I think it was like there and that's
another example of getting web two people on chain without
Malan that they're on chain.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
Timmy, great stuff man. Looking forward to seeing the growth
with our or our slash cr Crancy and that's all Brenden,
a huge community, and looking forward to the future updates
and as well as around.

Speaker 1 (44:02):
Part Yeah, I know, I know we talked about it,
but I'm looking forward to you something on doing an
AMA there like well, uh, I don't know. I think
I think people can get a lot out of it,
So I'm excited to see what's happening.

Speaker 2 (44:14):
Oh for sure, Timmy, thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker 1 (44:18):
Thank you you have a good one.

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